Searching recorded video can be an extremely time consuming and labor intensive process. Video surveillance systems normally include a recorder for recording the video captured by the surveillance cameras. Initially, videocassette recorders were used for recording this data; however, the tapes could only be searched by having personnel review the tapes to find the portion of interest. The development of digital video recorders improved the searching process with the use of algorithms to search for specific items, such as when an item has disappeared from the area being viewed by the video camera. However, the ability to quickly and easily find a specific video clip has not significantly improved; the process still requires personnel to review the video as with VCR tapes.
Video analytics is quickly gaining attention within the video security industry, and systems and components that use rather advanced techniques for extracting high-level information from a digital video stream are starting to be deployed. Video analytics is usually implemented in one of two places: 1) at the “edge”, i.e., at the camera end, or 2) at the “head end”, the device in the system having significant processing power. Most early attempts at video analytics were implemented at the head end because the amount of computational horsepower needed for meaningful analysis was only available in a personal computer type platform. Thus analog video was piped into a PC through a video capture card that would digitize video and present the frames to the analysis software. The computer would perform a variety of computations on these digital frames and detect various behaviors and then report these either through a proprietary graphical user interface directly to an operator or generate information via some signaling system (usually an IP network) to another system which could either log that information or generate alarms or events within some surveillance system.